ABSTRACT
The span of Lefebvre’s work crisscrosses the terrain of twentieth-century intellectual concerns. His early works were prescient, foreshadowing changes to come in philosophy and its relation to the body, to politics, and to the progressive social sciences. His later works, published in the 1940s and 1950s, are ‘crossroads in the reorganization of the intellectual field of the second half of the twentieth century.’ In his most eloquent and creative period, in the 1960s and 1970s, he transfigures Marxism, nurtures a corporeal, material approach to everyday life and capitalism and projects the dialectic into areas we only now, at the end of the century, begin to grasp. His final, shorter pieces, published during the 1980s, are reminders, pointed aphorisms whose well-placed character hints at his ongoing engagement with Utopian social projects.
